


The Bodies of August

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-08
Updated: 2011-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-23 13:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/250740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A gruesome string of murders leaves half of London too frightened to leave their homes – but if they had a flatmate like John's, they might reconsider.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bodies of August

Silence stretches taut across the empty intersection. Every small, reluctant noise – the desperate whine of an engine a block away, a jarring, jangling mobile hastily stifled, the self-conscious slap of a bicycle descending from the curb to the burning black street – snaps at that oppressive shroud of panicked _quiet_ and makes it hum for just a moment with the expectation of chaos, with a dreadful over-the-shoulder vigilance. It's less like a battlefield than a bad neighbourhood uneasy in the dead dark clutches of the midnight hours, where every shuttered window is a blind eye and every barred door a turned back. John's felt this way on the wrong sides of a few different cities at three in the morning – exhaustingly wary, connected to the other stirring souls only by a choke-line of suspicion.

But this is Baker Street, at eight o'clock in the evening. On a Friday. It isn't possible, not even during a heat wave.

He lets the 139 roar by in its oblivious fealty to schedule – almost entirely empty, but on-time – and then starts across the road. As unthinkable as all of this is, he's left the _truly_ impossible upstairs draped across the sofa like a soft watch melting over the side of a table. Half of London is afraid to step outside, but John simply can't stay in.

Climbing the street, swerving across two traffic-free lanes and diving into the wilted green of the park, he goes in search of someplace that hasn't been slowly roasting in the sun for fourteen hours. The living trees are a relief, even if they are drooping in this utter absence of a breeze. The shade is infinitely preferable to the artificial darkness of the flat, so close and unbreatheable it might be provoked into an exasperated explosion at any moment. Sherlock's been glued to his phone since coming home around two, sweat dripping into his eyes, shirt sticking between his shoulders, brutally detached from everything that's not on-screen. The urge to shake him is what's driven John out into the world even at the risk of becoming one of the Bodies of August, as the papers have dubbed them.

He tries to think about the bodies as often as possible, because they leave no room for anything else. Like a flame under an upturned jar, the thought of them, red, mutilated and wrong, burns everything away to a vacuum. The worst are the eyes, lids ripped away to leave a horrifying dead man's stare under a screamingly ragged flayed _blank_ that used to be a brow. John's not an easy man to put off his stomach, but sometimes he sees them for hours.

And there are _so many_. Two weeks of terror have lost the city thirty men and women. Sherlock claims to see patterns, but as far as John can tell they've been chosen indiscriminately – and the endless diversity of Londoners keeping themselves out of sight must mean that most people agree with his assessment. Anyone could be next. Even Sherlock has taken to spending nights at home instead of seeing to the countless tasks that usually keep him out during the more inhuman hours. Two weeks of dangerous nights too hot to allow for sleep, and John spends them slumped in front of the television hoping against hope to cool down while Sherlock crouches over his laptop until there's nothing left to be done. The room is like a deep unbroken fever full of fleeting visions and fading figures in moon-white skin and vests riding up in the muggy air, lank hair, restless fingers, those long legs lashing out at the untouchable nothing of the heat under the desk, furious, frustrated. And then suddenly, three nights ago (and each night after that), like the silky, bass promise of thunder, that mouth –

John forces himself back to the bodies again, jogging his mind into the present as he darts away from an inhospitable desert of tennis courts. Disembowelment is something he understands.

The papers say the Bodies of August have their abdomens slashed open, but in truth they've clearly been handled with a fair amount of care. There's very little violence in the post-mortem violations; they're precise and surgical, and would likely take some time. That's why there must be more than one killer – probably three, judging by the rate of the murders, the locations. The ribs are all cracked for no apparent reason three inches out from the sternum. He counted ribs last night, he remembers, and it felt natural to do it, letting his fingers slip into the muscled groove between the bones, one, two, three, as he dug up past thin white cotton –

The first three deaths occurred on August first, and were discovered less than twenty-four hours later. That would have been enough for the papers to feed off for the rest of the month, easily, but of course it didn't stop there. John himself was present when they found the second set – a matched pair, that time – and even now he can see very clearly the perfect progression of spine on the prostrate corpse, sharp orderly peaks of bone showcased under clinging, bloodless skin. Funny how it never occurred to him to remember that last night, when another long, slender back arched away from him, strained with pleasure and striped by the streetlight leaking in through the blinds –

He has to stop. This is _not_ helping; he only feels ill.

It's not that he doesn't want it to happen again. He's even let himself imagine that tonight _he'll_ be the one to seize Sherlock by the wrist on his way to the kitchen, instead of the other way around; that _he'll_ be the one to drag him impatiently down into the hollow of the chair, his eyes flashing with the boiling determination to find _some_ release, _somewhere_. He wants it very much.

But the fixed, blunt silence that always greets him the next day is unbearable. It makes him want to crawl out of his skin. He would pace or retreat upstairs or even organize the bloody pantry if it wasn't so hot, just for something to keep himself from wondering why it is that sunrise marks the hard, impenetrable line between _together_ and _alone_ , why a few hours of sleep should change everything beyond recognition. It might be cowardice that prevents him from asking outright, but he prefers to think of it as futility. It's the work that's to blame. He already knows it. Why demand an explanation? The brittle monosyllables of the morning after tell him all he needs to know, that until the middle of the night Sherlock might as well be dead to him, back bent, ribs cracked, belly slit, eyes open –

He stops to lean against a tree, sitting after a moment in the dry grass overlooking the small pond. He only means to catch his breath, but then the sun has set and the sky begins to fade and a man who must think he's completely insane – or a murderer – tells him the park is closing before hurrying on.

John doesn't want to go straight home, but he is _not_ insane – his next stop is slightly more populated. He lingers there even after his sandwich, supposedly take-away – his original excuse for leaving the flat at all – has been delivered into his hands and demolished, and watches the slow trickle of pedestrians diminish to next to nothing. The young woman behind the counter doesn't once ask him why he's still there, perhaps because she's afraid he'll leave; she seems to be working alone. He stays until she locks up at half past ten. They walk without a word, not quite together, not quite apart, until she splits off to join the smallish knot of nervous faces descending to the Tube.

When he fits his key into the lock of two twenty-one and feels the door falling open before him and nearly runs straight into Sherlock's elbow and nettled glare, he realizes _this_ is the only man who's looked him in the eye all day.

Sherlock gives him a cursory once-over, his mouth pinched with displeasure. "You said you were going to bring back sandwiches."

"I said I was going to _get_ a sandwich."

"No you didn't. – All right, inside."

Whatever the purpose of that outing was going to be, John seems to have foiled it – they both head upstairs, jostling along to squeeze through the door and shut themselves up once again in the sitting room. John flees immediately to the kitchen for a glass of water.

"They've found a lead," Sherlock says, dropping onto the sofa. "Well – they _will_. I've set them on an excellent starting place."

That's worth turning away from the blessed outpouring of cold, heavy air that follows the water filter out of the refrigerator. "What? On the August killers?"

"Mm." One of Sherlock's eyebrows quirks upward; he's clearly unimpressed. "If they take much longer about it, the papers will have to come up with a better name. I wish they would – _August_ isn't a word I'd use for someone who can't even properly scalp a man. You should've seen today's lot – a real mess."

Sherlock _not_ talking isn't always the worst part, of course. "And you think they'll take that long – into next month?" John doubts he could bear it. Something will have to break; the city's at too high a pitch now not to resolve soon, or screech off into total bedlam. Even he's ready to latch onto the feeblest of hopes. Sherlock speaking in complete sentences is like the smell of a distant storm on asphalt, a humid hint of relief that may never arrive.

"Not sure." He gropes around on the floor behind the coffee table, and comes up with his phone. "A few days more at the very least, unfortunately. I'm working up a backlog."

And just like that, their little gust of conversation dies away.

As the hazy silver of the evening changes to night and the lamps slowly overpower the daylight to glaze the windows golden and opaque, the room lies becalmed. John goes to change into something a bit less drenched, and regrets eating anything at all as he lets the shallow, soothing noise of the television wash over him, his supper sitting like a ballast stone in his stomach. The little scrap of normalcy he's just been treated to is a much-needed reminder that this case, like all the others, will eventually come to a close. Whether it peters out into a mystery or winds up neatly folded away in the courts is, to many of the people involved in sorting it out, only a detail. Maybe it'll fade with the summer – and cooler weather will bring others like it, and nothing very much will change. It's all a question of degree. Hoping for something to _break_ is foolish, almost as foolish as letting Sherlock be the one to decide when things can be _normal._

John knows he has to set things back to the way they were – because they are, really. August is no different than July, only a little hotter; the Bodies of August are just like all the other bodies dropped in alleys and stuffed in corners and tossed into rivers, all the bodies lying before him in a zagging line waiting to be discovered, so long as he stays here.

The only body that's changed at all, really, is his own. He should just … stop. Perhaps the frenzy will pass when he does.

It seems a good, solid plan until he's walking back from the kitchen with a cold glass and Sherlock's hand creeps up his arm – it might as well be disembodied, the way it appears to act of its own accord while its master's eyes drink in another email. He should just keep walking –

But he drops in beside Sherlock, setting his glass aside and pressing the chilled palm of his hand against the exposed skin of Sherlock's flank where his shirt's pulled away from his trousers, and for a moment he lets himself imagine that the resulting _hiss_ is a true cooling, pressure released, steam rising away to condense on the windows and fall like rain. But it's only Sherlock's breath rushing out between his teeth, emerging hot as ever to swirl into the hollow of John's throat, the swell before the storm of his lips and teeth. He should just stop – but he melts into it again, giving himself up to the hope that this will somehow drive away the dread that hangs over him like a huge, relentless sun in an empty sky.


End file.
